Video Killed The Radio Star - Someone Tell Jeremy Corbyn

Video is an increasingly important platform for youth engagement. Potential Labour leadership candidates all know this right? You would imagine that all of the candidates are surrounded by fantastic people giving them great advice? It seems not.

We went to the home pages of each of the four leadership candidates to see what video has been offered up by each of them

Liz Kendall, all alone in a room working hard behind a screen. Poor lonely Liz. Whatever she is saying is completely obscured by the fact that there is no visual narrative. Where are the people she is working hard for?

2.Andy Burnham, all round popular guy in his community and with his family. This video on the front page of his campaign site is better than the 7 minute long video released about him and his wife and how his brothers like him (better than the last guy) Does it appeal to a broad demographic? Does it inspire? Not us.

3. Yvette Cooper, does a much better job. Her video is more engaging, you feel you know her (without schmaltz) and her vision and policy. I liked Yvette more after watching her video - whatever you believe, it is very clear what Yvette stands for and full marks if that was its intent. Will it engage a new swathe of voters though? Maybe not.

Instead of preaching and telling - this film has regular voters talking about the hope that Jeremy Corbyn offers them. Rather than Jeremy doing the talking, he's letting other people do it for him. He's not even making his own video. He's letting the You Tube generation do it for him. Now there's an advocacy marketing approach. Was this the strategy all along? Something seems to be working for Jeremy Corbyn.

If we consider our B2B space, it certainly works in this context to have your customers doing the talking rather than a vendor doing some preaching. Is this why Corbyn is ahead in the polls? Listening and not telling could be a smart strategy, but media could have been better deployed to help disrupt traditional decision making.

While we feel it is a failure to not have campaign video on the Corbyn campaign home page. This independent piece is a success and the movement for Corbyn is interesting. Was it a tactical decision to keep Jeremy Corbyn off You Tube? Or maybe his team are not as connected to the younger generation as the Corbynmania movement suggests?

What do you think?

From our B2B perspective these videos mostly fail. They would not win you a new customer. They speak to the existing market, in this case Labour Leadership voters, they affirm pre-determined choices rather than disrupting traditional decision making.

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For a lot of those taking part, choosing a party leader is not about assembling a governing majority, winning power or even making a change in society. It is about identity. It is about being true to yourself. In this sense, joining the Corbyn tribe becomes something non-negotiable, or at least impregnable to routine political arguments about electability, popular appeal and the like. Those kinds of calculations are held to be cynical, because they require you to compromise something fundamental about who you are.
They are doing it not because they think he can win, but for the same reason people retweet images of same-sex weddings. In the current New Statesman, Helen Lewis notes the tendency of people on social media towards “‘virtue signalling’ – showing off to your friends about how right-on you are”.